Maya: Classic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Kwoka.

This is an abstract from the "La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Maya Fortress and Its Environs" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While fortifications speak to the potential for conflict, indicators of actual warfare are difficult to discern. The ancient Maya produced few lithic implements that were strictly martial in nature. Furthermore, evidence of destruction events, such as large-scale fires, preserve poorly in tropical environments. However, recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anais Levin. John Walden. Jaime Awe.

The use and production of lithic tools offers an avenue into the behavior and activities conducted in ancient residential and ritual contexts. We explore variability in the lithic assemblages of various contexts in the ancient Maya neighborhood of Tutu Uitz Na in the Late-Terminal Classic period (AD 700-900). Tutu Uitz Na is one of several neighborhoods surrounding the Lower Dover political center in the Belize River Valley. Variation in household lithic assemblages might vary based on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Murtha.

Sometimes described as a mosaic, regional land use and landscape in the Maya lowlands offer a unique opportunity to investigate the spatial and temporal dimensions and the socio-ecological dynamics of a variety of cultural systems, settlement patterns, and the environment. Unfortunately, the majority of urban theory applied to the lowlands focuses exclusively on urban authority and power for the provisioning of resources. Such approaches offer useful discussion and debate about the scale and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monica Rodriguez. Vera Tiesler. Jeffrey B. Glover. Dominique Rissolo.

In this paper, we provide a sinopsis of the two dozen burial findings from the archaeological site of Vista Alegre, Quintana Roo, recovered during a decade (2008 to 2017). Most of the mortuary contexts from Vista Alegre were documented using detailed in situ recording (archaeothanatology), followed by macroscopic and isotopic research in a collaborative effort between the Georgia State University and the Bioarchaeology Lab of the University of Yucatan. Put in context with other burial series...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Garrison.

Conflict pervaded the civilizations of ancient Mesoamerica from an early time. In the Maya lowlands, the physical vestiges of defensive fortifications date to the Late Preclassic period, while textual evidence of conflict comes from the subsequent Early Classic period. This paper examines settlement changes within the context of a contested landscape. The Buenavista Valley, largely controlled during the Classic period by the kingdom of El Zotz, extends out west from the great city of Tikal....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eva Lemonnier. Julien Hiquet. Julien Sion.

This is an abstract from the "The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations carried out since 2011 at the site of Naachtun provide series of data useful to draw with sufficient details, the historical trajectory of this Maya Classic regional capital located between Tikal and Calakmul. Starting its development with the construction of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Munson.

This is an abstract from the "People and Space: Defining Communities and Neighborhoods with Social Network Analysis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent studies using network analysis in archaeology seek to understand the interactions and structures that defined past societies. Such approaches are based on graph theoretic models that are simplifications of reality used to conceptualize and describe relationships, either qualitatively or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rossana May. Tomás Gallareta Negrón. William Ringle.

This is an abstract from the "The Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project: 25 Years of Research in the Puuc" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Domestic architecture in the Puuc Hills shows an unusually high incidence of vaulted buildings, often considered to be the residences of higher status community members. The factors guiding their placement within communities are understudied, however. This is unfortunate since the siting of such expensive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chloé Andrieu. Charlotte Arnaud.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Various studies have suggested that, as a consequence of the radical crises that the Maya cities underwent at the end of the Classic period, a portion of Central Lowlands population could have migrated towards the Yucatán peninsula. However, very few...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucia Henderson.

This paper examines the foreign connections evidenced by the material record of Early Classic Kaminaljuyu. The author discusses the ways in which public art, architecture, and elite funerary contexts evolved at Kaminaljuyu during this time, evaluating how these changing styles may have tied into evolving relationships with distant sites and regions such as Teotihuacan, Veracruz, and the Maya lowlands. The Early Classic relationship between Kaminaljuyu and Teotihuacan has, in many ways, eclipsed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jocelyne Ponce. Marcello Canuto. Tomás Barrientos.

This is an abstract from the "A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over two dozen hieroglyphic panels looted in the 1960s from the site of La Corona, formerly known as “Site Q,” ended up in private collections around the globe. Some of these panels are featured in the Grolier Catalog. While the monuments have provided extensive information on the role...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik Velásquez García.

This is an abstract from the "New Light on Dzibanché and on the Rise of the Snake Kingdom’s Hegemony in the Maya Lowlands" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Diversos hallazgos arqueológicos en Dzibanché (Kaanu'l) y en otros sitios de las tierras bajas mayas orientales han revelado que el asiento original de los gobernantes de la dinastía Kaanu'l o "Cabeza de Serpiente" se encontraba en el sur del actual estado mexicano de Quintana Roo. En esta...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holley Moyes. Harriet Beaubien. Erin Ray.

This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Indigenous Culture and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past 30 years archaeologists have made large strides in understanding the function and meaning of ancient Maya ritual caves sites. Ethnographic analyses have made major contributions to interpretive efforts and advanced the field in innumerable ways. Throughout Mesoamerica, there have been many long-term sustained...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Landau. Christopher Hernandez. Nancy Gonlin.

This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As the sun set on the horizon, ancient city dwellers would have felt the cooler air, heard cicadas’ songs, and perhaps tasted a late-night snack. Their vision, however, would have suffered the most as dusk turned to night and some form of illumination was necessary to see others, carry on activities, or get to bed....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bernadette Cap.

This is an abstract from the "Where Is Provenance? Bridging Method, Evidence, and Theory for the Interpretation of Local Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Is a stone tool crafted from a raw material found naturally occurring only outside the geographic zone and political control of a settlement, but made in the site’s central marketplace, a non-local or local good? In this paper, I present examples of such a situation at two Classic Maya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Freidel. Juan Carlos Melendez.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Classic Maya (CE 250–800) texts include a phrase k’a’ay u sak nikte’, faded his white flower, as a reference to the ending of the sweet breath of rulers and as a metaphor of their death. The breath—allegory of white flower—is evidently an allusion to soul force. Scholars identified on Tikal Stela 5 a reference for a White Flower Soul Container,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Dober. Rachel Cajigas. Alexandre Tokovinine. Aura Barrientos. Francisco Estrada-Belli.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Shallow geophysical prospecting methods have been underutilized in the Lowland Mayan regions due, in part, to the densely forested environment. Recent research at La Sufricaya, a Classic Maya site in the Homul region, has produced promising results using magnetic gradiometry to identify features buried below the plaza surface. Despite copious foliage and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Freiwald. Kara Fulton. Nicholas Billstrand. Destiny Micklin.

The patio adjacent to the eastern structure of Group 1 at the site of Actuncan served as a burial ground for generations. At least twelve individuals in more than seven graves were buried at one of the oldest residential groups at the site during the Late Classic period (AD 600-900). Eastern structures were used to bury revered ancestors in the Belize River Valley, but nearly all of the Actuncan Group 1 burials were disturbed by later burials. When was it acceptable to disturb an ancestor, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanne Baron.

At the time of Spanish contact, the Mesoamerican commercial economy was highly elaborated, with an interconnected system of marketplaces, a large variety of goods bought and sold as commodities, and the widespread use of currency in the form of cacao and woven textiles. While much of what we know of this economic system is provided by written records, the presence of large-scale marketplaces and currency can be traced into earlier periods using archaeological evidence. This evidence suggests...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany Lindley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Investigations at Floodplain North of the San Lorenzo Survey Area, located in the hinterlands of Xunantunich, examined the political and economic behaviors of a community as the navigated major transformations of the Terminal Classic (780-950 AD) period. While causes of the Maya collapse, the abandonment of large centers, and the changes in elite culture...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Levi.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient Maya places were dynamic assemblages of people, the things that they made and used, and myriad material and immaterial affordances. Unfortunately, a simple enumeration of their components cannot account for the historical valence carried by places. In northwestern Belize, the multi-scalar operation of ritual may help clarify...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Golden. Takeshi Inomata.

This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout his decades of scholarship, Stephen Houston has fundamentally changed our understanding of Maya courtly life and community. He synergistically weaves results from groundbreaking decipherment and archaeological excavations like no other scholar in the field. His many publications...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Cheek.

Dress is an object made up of other objects. I combine a practice approach with the chaîne opératoire and behavior chains methods to analyze technical and social acts involving dress objects. The analysis starts with one segment of the actions involving dress—the actual act of dressing. The study includes only court scenes that appear to memorialize historic events, although some of the observations and conclusions can be applied to other kinds of scenes and other media. After identifying the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alma Marroquín. Anna Bishop.

This is an abstract from the "La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Maya Fortress and Its Environs" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La Cuernavilla’s palace complex is made up of 14 elongated structures around two internal patios seated on a wide raised platform. Its location at the foot of the escarpment in the extreme northeast of the Lower East Group protects and restricts its access from the surrounding Buenavista Valley. Causeways into the escarpment...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Crimmel. Yimeng Yan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya center of El Pilar is a mid-sized settlement nestled on the ecotone dividing the central Peten and Belize river valley. With nearly half of the site consisting of seasonally inundated wetlands, defining the extent and nature of these areas is essential before interpreting El Pilar’s settlement patterns. Remotely sensed lidar and...